Made some rather decent lasagna the other day. Just didn't realize until I started that it was more prep work than anything else. I hate dicing onions, and mincing garlic is a giant PITA. That being said, it turned out pretty good. Needs a bit of tweaking (less garlic, less tomato sauce, more meat, more salt, and maybe even another half an onion), but pretty damn tasty for a first try.

Yeah, that's how I did it when I made my chili, too, but you really need a decent chef's knife for the job. We have nothing but a bunch of decade-old, super-cheap, dull serrated blades, and you can still do that method, but the pieces are more uneven and the onion layers slide around a lot more because of the extra grinding you have to do to get through them.

When I get a place of my own, I am definitely investing in a good set of knives. I'm gonna hack off a finger one of these days with the crap we have now.

It's quick enough that you can usually do it before your eyes even start to water.

That's awesome. That's basically how I've done it except for the two horizontal cuts, and that makes so much more sense. I've grown pretty much immune to crying over onions because of all the bulk onions I've cut in restaurants, but this is still great to use. Also I need a better knife.

Kusoyaro: We don't need a leader. We need to SHUT UP. Make what you want to make, don't make you what you don't want to make. If neither of those applies to you, then you need to SHUT UP MORE.

BasharOfTheAges wrote:Of course, we both use dried beans and soak them overnight in beef broth.

Tried this with our chili and OMFG what a difference!!! 2/3 carnivores agree, the beans in the chili tasted like amazing and sex. (the 3rd was Jingoro and he wouldn't even touch them on the grounds they lacked sufficient carnivorous content.)

I used beef and onion soup mix, cooked it up with a couple scotch bonnets worth of seeds then cooled and soaked. Those bad boys tasted like a mad cow fiesta! Also added a Ghost chili in the "hot" vat for extra win. I was a little sad it wasn't warmer, next time more jolokia for more win.

<Orwell> WTF are they doing upstairs. Almost sounds like construction<[Kristyrat]> Orwell, you see / <[Kristyrat]> when a man really likes a woman / <[Kristyrat]> or has a bottle of chloroform<inthesto> He takes her stuff / <inthesto> And then poops in her vagina

Tonight's dessert! Silly me forgot to take a photo once it was finished, but a "cut-in" photo works, too.

Baked apples with a filling of red hot candies, cinnamon, brown sugar, and butter. They turned out pretty good, but I think next time I need to cook them a bit longer (forty minutes instead of thirty-ish) and maybe make the filling on the stovetop as a syrup instead. The red hots didn't melt as much as I wanted.

Well, the idea of putting a syrup into the baked apples did not work at all. It just turned into a molten mass that hardened into rock solid candy. I seem to have this problem every single time I try to work with sugar.

Anyway, the extra baking time did help with the consistency, though... which I would be appreciating a lot more right now if my apples didn't taste like burnt red hots. : /